Lack of reliable information on crop yields can hinder different types of decisions in agriculture and other fields. Farmers typically want to know where to apply more or less inputs such as fertilizers or herbicides, and information on yield history can be very useful. Farmers also often want to know how much to pay for renting new properties and maps of yield histories can help to set expectations. Breeding companies may also want to know how their varieties are performing in different environments.
Images captured by satellites have long been used to generate crop yield estimates on a regional scale. Although some have tried to estimate crop for an area the size of an individual field, they have been unsuccessful in doing so. Often the estimates made using previous methodologies have a yield variation of half or greater than the actual yield. Besides lack of accuracy, other problems with using satellite imagery to estimate crop yield for an area the size of an individual field include the cost associated with getting the images and processing the images to obtain the desired information has been prohibitive and the lack of data of the actual yields of specific areas are often hard to obtain as records.